Last week at VMworld 2010 I had the opportunity to get some great pictures of HP and Dell’s newest blade servers. The HP Proliant BL620 G7, the HP Proliant BL680 G7 and the Dell PowerEdge M610X and M710HD.   These newest blade servers are exciting offerings from HP and Dell so I encourage you to take a few minutes to look.   

HP BL620 G7

The BL620 G7 is a full-height blade server with 2 x CPU sockets designed to handle the Intel 7500 (and possibly the 6500) CPU.  It has 32 memory DIMMS, 2 hot-plug hard drive bays and 3 mezzanine expansion slots. 

HP BL680 G7

The BL680 G7 is an upgrade to to the previous generation, however the 7th generation is a double-wide server.  This design offers up to 4 servers in a C7000 BladeSystem chassis.  This server’s claim to fame is that it will hold 1 terabyte (1TB) of RAM. 

PowerEdge 11G M710HD
Ideal for virtualization or applications requiring large amounts of memory, the M710HD is a half-height blade server that offers up:

*  Up to 2 Intel 5500 or 5600 Xeon Processors 
* 18 memory DIMMs
*  2 hot-swap drives (SAS and Solid State Drive Option)
* 2 mezzanine card slots
* dual SD slots for redundant hypervisor
*2 or 4 x 1Gb NICs

PowerEdge 11G M610x
As the industry continues to hype up GPGPU (General Purpose computing on Graphic Processor Units), it’s no surprise to see that Dell has announced the availability of a blade server with dedicated PCIe 16xGen2 slots.  Here’s some quick details about this blade server:

* Full-height blade server
* Up to 2 Intel 5500 or 5600 Xeon Processors 
* 12 memory DIMMs
*  2 hot-swap drives
* 2 mezzanine card slots
* 2 x PCIe 16x(Gen2) slots

Emulex and IBM announced today the availability of a new Emulex expansion card for blade servers that allows for up to 8 virtual nics to be assigned for each physical NIC.  The “Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter for IBM BladeCenter (IBM part # 49Y4235)” is a CFF-H expansion card is based on industry-standard PCIe architecture and can operate as a “Virtual NIC Fabric Adapter” or as a dual-port 10 Gb or 1 Gb Ethernet card. 

When operating as a Virtual NIC (vNIC) each of the 2 physical ports appear to the blade server as 4 virtual NICs for a total of 8 virtual NICs per card.  According to IBM, the default bandwidth for each vNIC is 2.5 Gbps. The cool feature about this mode is that the bandwidth for each vNIC can be configured from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps, up to a maximum of 10 Gb per virtual port.  The one catch with this mode is that it ONLY operates with the  BNT Virtual Fabric 10Gb Switch Module, which provides independent control for each vNIC.  This means no connection to Cisco Nexus…yet.  According to Emulex, firmware updates coming later (Q1 2010??) will allow for this adapter to be able to handle FCoE and iSCSI as a feature upgrade.  Not sure if that means compatibility with Cisco Nexus 5000 or not.  We’ll have to wait and see.

When used as a normal Ethernet Adapter (10Gb or 1Gb), aka “pNIC mode“, the card can is viewed as a  standard 10 Gbps or 1 Gbps 2-port Ethernet expansion card.   The big difference here is that it will work with any available 10 Gb switch or 10 Gb pass-thru module installed in I/O module bays 7 and 9.

So What?
I’ve known about this adapter since VMworld, but I haven’t blogged about it because I just don’t see a lot of value.  HP has had this functionality for over a year now in their VirtualConnect Flex-10  offering so this technology is nothing new.  Yes, it would be nice to set up a NIC in VMware ESX that only uses 200MB of a pipe, but what’s the difference in having a fake NIC that “thinks” he’s only able to use 200MB vs a big fat 10Gb pipe for all of your I/O traffic.  I’m just not sure, but am open to any comments or thoughts.